Global Systems, Economic & Political Models, and Russian/Cold War History

Vocabulary terms and definitions extracted directly from lecture notes covering international systems, economics, political ideologies, Russian imperial and Soviet history, and the Cold War.

Globalization

The growing connection between countries through trade, technology, communication, migration, culture, and international organizations.

Deglobalization

A reduction in international connections or dependence, often occurring when countries try to produce more goods domestically.

Cultural Homogeneity

The condition where different cultures become more similar as a result of global brands, entertainment, technology, and social media.

Cultural Hybridization

The process where different cultures blend together to create something new, such as K-pop combining Korean and international musical influences.

Protectionism

Government policies designed to shield domestic industries from foreign competition.

Tariff

A tax placed on imported goods.

Quota

A government-imposed physical limit on the quantity of imported goods.

Subsidy

Government financial support provided to domestic businesses to help them compete.

Geopolitics

The study of how geography, territory, resources, and strategic location influence a country's power and foreign policy.

Foreign Policy

How a country interacts with other countries to achieve its national goals.

Soft Power

The ability to influence countries through attraction, persuasion, culture, diplomacy, foreign aid, and educational exchanges.

Hard Power

The ability to influence countries through military force or economic pressure, such as sanctions, trade restrictions, or armed intervention.

Isolationism

A foreign policy approach centered on limiting involvement in other countries' affairs.

Unilateralism

A foreign policy approach where a country acts independently without relying on other nations.

Multilateralism

A foreign policy strategy characterized by cooperating with multiple countries.

Diplomacy

The practice of conducting negotiations between nations to resolve disagreements.

Containment

A foreign policy aimed at preventing an opposing ideology—especially communism during the Cold War—from spreading to other nations.

Deterrence

A strategy aimed at preventing an opponent from taking action by threatening unacceptable consequences.

Interventionism

A foreign policy characterized by becoming actively involved in another country's affairs.

Appeasement

Making concessions to an aggressive power in an attempt to avoid conflict.

United Nations (UN)

An international organization established in 1945 to promote peace, security, international cooperation, and human rights.

UN Charter

The founding document that establishes the United Nations' goals, core principles, and organizational structure.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)

A milestone document adopted in 1948 identifying fundamental human rights belonging to all people regardless of background.

UN Security Council

The UN body primarily responsible for international peace and security, consisting of 15 members, including five permanent members with veto power over substantive resolutions.

Land (Factor of Production)

Natural resources used in production, such as soil, forests, and oil reserves.

Labor (Factor of Production)

Human work and physical or mental effort dedicated to production, such as factory workers and teachers.

Capital (Factor of Production)

Human-made tools, machinery, and equipment used to produce other goods.

Entrepreneurship (Factor of Production)

The process of organizing resources and taking financial and business risks to establish an enterprise.

Command Economy

An economic system in which the central government makes major decisions regarding production quotas, pricing, and resource allocation.

Market Economy

An economic system in which supply, demand, and prices largely dictate production and distribution decisions made by businesses and consumers.

Mixed Economy

An economic system that combines private enterprise and free markets with government regulation and publicly funded services.

Socialism

An economic and political tradition that advocates for greater social or public ownership, control, and regulation of productive resources.

Capitalism

An economic system based largely on private ownership of property, profit seeking, competition, and free-market interactions.

Communism

An ideology aiming to achieve a classless society in which productive resources are held in common rather than controlled by a private capitalist class.

Bourgeoisie

In Marxist theory, the capitalist class that owns the means of production and productive property.

Proletariat

In Marxist theory, the working class that possesses no productive property and must sell its labor for wages.

Fascism

An authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology characterized by dictatorial rule, militarism, hierarchy, suppression of opposition, and extreme nationalism.

Democracy

A political system in which the people exercise political authority directly or through elected representatives under the rule of law and civil liberties.

Democratic Backsliding

The gradual erosion and weakening of democratic institutions, civil rights, judicial independence, and electoral fairness.

Authoritarianism

A political system wherein political power is concentrated in the hands of an authority and political competition or individual liberties are heavily restricted.

Autocracy

A system of government characterized by absolute rule by a single person with concentrated power.

Theocracy

A system of government where religious authorities or religious laws hold central political power.

Oligarchy

A form of government where power is concentrated in the hands of a small, elite group of people.

Totalitarianism

An extreme form of authoritarian rule that seeks total control over political, economic, social, and cultural life via propaganda, surveillance, censorship, and terror.

Illiberal Democracy

A governing system that conducts regular popular elections but severely compromises civil liberties, minority protections, and judicial independence.

Romanov Dynasty

The imperial royal dynasty that ruled Russia from 1613 to 1917, concluding with the forced abdication of Tsar Nicholas II.

Buffer Zones

Territories located between rival powers that provide geographic separation and strategic distance to reduce the direct threat of military attack.

Bloody Sunday

A massacre on January 22, 1905, where imperial Russian troops fired upon peaceful demonstrators marching to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg.

March Revolution

The 1917 popular uprising triggered by food shortages, economic strain, and World War I hardships that forced Nicholas II to abdicate, ending the Romanov Dynasty.

Provisional Government

The temporary government established after the fall of the Russian monarchy in 1917, led prominently by Alexander Kerensky, which lost support by staying in World War I.

Bolsheviks

The radical socialist party led by Vladimir Lenin that promised 'peace, land, and bread' and seized state power in the October Revolution of 1917.

Vanguard Party

Vladimir Lenin's organizational concept of a highly disciplined, dedicated revolutionary party tasked with leading the working class to revolution.

Marxism-Leninism

The official ideological foundation of the Soviet state, fusing Karl Marx's theories on class struggle with Lenin's emphasis on a centralized vanguard party.

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

The March 1918 peace agreement signed between Bolshevik Russia and the Central Powers that took Russia out of World War I at the price of significant territorial losses.

New Economic Policy (NEP)

An economic policy introduced by Lenin in 1921 that temporarily permitted limited private trade, small enterprise, and surplus sales while the state controlled heavy industry and banking.

Leon Trotsky

A key Bolshevik leader who organized and directed the Red Army to victory during the Russian Civil War, later exiled and assassinated after losing a power struggle to Stalin.

Cheka

The initial Bolshevik secret police agency founded in 1917 under Lenin to execute the Red Terror and eliminate perceived counter-revolutionary threats.

NKVD

The Soviet state security and internal affairs agency used under Joseph Stalin to carry out surveillance, arrests, forced labor transport, and the Great Purges.

Socialist Realism

The state-mandated artistic style in the Soviet Union under Stalin requiring all art and literature to depict workers, communist leaders, and industrialization favorably.

Gulags

The extensive Soviet penal network of forced-labor camps used to punish common criminals and political dissidents under severe physical conditions.

Collectivization

Stalin's policy of forcibly eliminating private peasant farms and consolidating them into state-managed collective agricultural enterprises.

Kulaks

A term used to describe relatively wealthier peasants whom Stalin portrayed as class enemies and targeted for property confiscation, exile, imprisonment, and execution.

Holodomor

A devastating, catastrophic famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 engineered through forced collectivization and grain requisition quotas, causing millions of deaths.

Five-Year Plans

Stalin's centralized economic roadmaps that established strict production targets to rapidly expand Soviet heavy industry, coal, and steel output.

Red Terror

A campaign of political violence, imprisonment, and executions directed by Lenin and the Cheka during the Russian Civil War to crush anti-Bolshevik resistance.

The Great Purges

A series of state-sponsored terror campaigns from 1936 to 1938 under Stalin that used show trials, false accusations, and executions to eliminate political, military, and civilian rivals.

Pogroms

Violent, organized mob attacks and riots targeting specific ethnic or religious communities, historically aimed at Jewish populations in the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe.

Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

A nonaggression treaty signed in August 1939 between Nazi Germany and the USSR containing secret protocols that partitioned Eastern Europe into separate spheres of influence.

Operation Barbarossa

Nazi Germany's military invasion of the Soviet Union launched on June 22, 1941, violating the nonaggression pact and opening the Eastern Front.

The Big Three

The primary Allied leadership coalition during World War II comprising Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin.

Tehran Conference

A 1943 wartime summit where the Big Three met to coordinate joint military strategies against Nazi Germany and plan the opening of a second front in Western Europe.

Yalta Conference

A February 1945 conference where the Allied leaders planned the postwar partition of Germany, the governance of liberated European states, and Soviet entry into the Pacific War.

Potsdam Conference

A July–August 1945 summit attended by Truman, Attlee, and Stalin to settle the demilitarization, occupation, and reconstruction of defeated Germany.

Bretton Woods

A 1944 international monetary conference that created the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to secure postwar economic stability.

Marshall Plan

A U.S. economic initiative enacted in 1948 providing approximately $13 billion to rebuild war-torn Western Europe and prevent the spread of communism.

Berlin Airlift

A joint American and British operation from 1948 to 1949 that flew provisions, food, and fuel into West Berlin after the Soviet Union blockaded surface access.

Berlin Wall

A fortified barrier erected by East Germany in August 1961 with Soviet support to prevent citizens from fleeing into capitalist West Berlin.

Iron Curtain

A term popularized by Winston Churchill in 1946 describing the political, military, and ideological boundary dividing Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe from the West.

Truman Doctrine

A 1947 U.S. foreign policy pledge by President Harry S. Truman to provide economic and military aid to nations resisting subjugation by armed minorities or outside communist pressures.

NATO

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a mutual defense alliance established in 1949 by Western nations anchored by the collective security principle of Article 5.

Warsaw Pact

A 1955 collective defense treaty established by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European communist allies to counter NATO.

Satellite State

A formally sovereign country that remains under the dominant political, military, and economic control of an external power.

Proxy Wars

Armed conflicts in which opposing global powers support, fund, and arm surrogate forces rather than engaging each other in direct military conflict.

Domino Theory

The geopolitical theory holding that the political fall of one country to communism would trigger the sequential fall of surrounding neighboring countries.

Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs)

A category of arms capable of causing widespread casualties and extensive destruction, including nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)

A strategic military doctrine wherein both opposing nuclear powers maintain sufficient arsenals to ensure the total destruction of both parties in the event of an attack.

De-Stalinization

A policy program initiated by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 to condemn Joseph Stalin's cult of personality, release political prisoners, and curb state terror.